By Irena Nagler

March 12, 2020. Out on the town with friends. We are in a restaurant. Upon leaving, we see it has mysterious doorframes. Two are rectangular. One is round, named “Eternity”, and seems to be forbidden, but we are drawn to defy that and move toward it anyway. It has a silver-gray cast. Within it is a mirror, in which we see someone whose body has become a chair with white plastic upholstery. The doorway now reminds me of a window in a washing machine.

Everything dreams. Every element, every cell, every organism.

While asleep, or under waking skin, we often dream of what we don’t think about or carry out in everyday consciousness.

During 2020-21, I dreamed of lively, open-faced groups gathered in buildings after midnight, of adventurers defying orders. I dreamed questions and clues to examine.

The human collective dreams. In 2015, photos were posted in social media of a fata morgana vision: a city in clouds over China. Real event or hoax, it was evocative and rang true on a mythic level.

In the winter of 2020, some of those massed clouds dissipated as factories closed. Serial images of polluted skies followed by clearing ones were bandied about the world.

In some of the factories, in vast spaces filled with lines of people and machines, employees spent long, monotonous, underpaid hours manufacturing electronic devices to be shipped around the world. Many of the workers were(?) immigrants from the Philippines, seeking conditions beyond current dictatorship and an instability that reportedly has existed since US occupation.

The employees in photographs and films wear gloves. Some might wear masks. Mask-wearing has been common in Asia for decades: a courtesy when not feeling well or a request for privacy on public transportation.

China has a near-monopoly on manufacture of electronic communication devices. It also hosts more rare-earth mining for electronic and alternative technology than any other nation. Much of it involves separating magnetic from radioactive substances, which contaminates water and soil. A prominent info-tech CEO was asked once about “bringing the work home.” Without describing labor conditions or pollution, he answered that it would be impossible to persuade Americans to do the work needed to meet the vast demand.

At home, in March 2020, dream-smog drifts and settles in late winter air. “It’s weird, they’re shutting down the entire country,” says a manager at work. “I used to work in Florida. It’s like preparing for a hurricane,” replies a co-worker.

The city is petrified and hushed. At the bus station, a man stumbles to the ground near the street. I ask him if he’s all right and find his phone for him. He wants to shake hands. I do, and am remonstrated with the next day by friends for having touched him. The bus is almost empty.

March 17, 2020. More washing machines! They’re arrayed outdoors. There is news of a darkened sun. I see it now, between clouds, black with a deep-purple cast like blackberry juice. Something seems deceptive about it. The light hasn’t changed: it’s full daylight, late morning, with no violet cast to the atmosphere. And the purple sun is in the southwest, not easterly as it normally would be.

No internet. My last day online is March 18. I have computers for writing and music, but I chose a few years ago not to go online at home anymore, and I don’t intend to be drawn back into it under pressure now. I love the Internet, but I’m EMF-sensitive to a degree and have always felt dubious about the materials composing the machines, even before studying the supply chains for them. I don’t have a smartphone, for that and other reasons.

I barely make it out of the Michigan Union before it closes. They’re waiting for me to go. I’m the last one in the room, filling out a census form, observing and experiencing the crude beginnings of Facebook censorship in regard to Covid-19.

I step out into a gray day. I feel strangely liberated, encountering an organic pulse of living and dreaming weighed upon by fear. I understand that for many it is a reality calling forth courage and compassion.

I want to acknowledge various angles and listen to stories that reach me. Even without Internet, they do. Some of my friends research diligently, digging beneath predominant narratives, often in reputable sources of scientific data, of organizational track records and history. One friend has connections with microbiologists. Others know hospital workers. There’s an intelligent questioning that bears no resemblance to the simplistic political dualities perpetuated by media. I suspect exaggeration of the more frightening possibilities in an effort at crowd-control, trumping genuine education to a disquieting degree.

Despite denial from some quarters, there is real illness and death. It is not, even in potential, the medieval-street plague vaguely hinted at as ensuing if people don’t behave. It doesn’t, in scale, resemble what I gather about 1918, to which it’s often compared openly. Yet, it may be like them during that March and April within emergency rooms and hospital wards.

There is an atmosphere of war, evoking realms of reconnaissance and defense near boundaries of atmosphere and space, an invisible weight drawing near. I’ve seldom heard so much military language applied to a situation. Even beyond the eerily exhilarating Blue Angels show in Spring 2020, and the annual Yankee Air Museum Display, I’ve never seen so many military planes flying low, as if hunting down microbes with behemoths.

Yet at our feet, on sidewalks, anonymous sweet drawings and messages are chalked, hearts and flowers and words of comfort.

I remember huddling one night under the big beech tree in Island Park with friends and glowing lanterns. Our hands on the dark earth, knowing we were all right down on the nurturing ground, no matter what was happening higher up where helicopters and potential surveillance craft and harsh light seemed to drown the stars.

Two friends of mine died during March and April 2020, but not of Covid. One of them, who thrived on in-person visits, may be among those described in two far-flung sources: a British medical journal, and a nurse in an Oakland County hospital. (“More elderly people are dying of neglect than are actually dying of Covid,” they both said.)

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April 11, 2020. Dreaming about the wave of Covid-19. There is a rowboat on a sea, near a mountain. An impression of “things turning around by tomorrow.” In the rowboat is a man with black hair and a beard, maybe a Cossack. He is a “flame-adventurer,” a maverick, able to light fire with a torch and reverse the course of things. I’ve dreamt of him before.

I take springtime walks, alone and with others. The wind pushes and pulls. The flow of air billows in the leaves, tugs at our hair, the smells of spring are fresh and moist, and the not-so-distant Great Lakes churn—you can taste them in the wind. Clouds voyage over the edge of the earth-curve. Trips to Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, water melting into distant sky.

A glimpse between houses in a condo complex gives the appearance of a faerie road, wending an alternate route across the landscape toward hills opposite. So many worlds occupy the same space, many of them probably more real than the grids we have laid down. Once, our human paths were worn by use, instead of imposed by a few planners.

In the Arb, a woodpecker hammers a branch. I imagine a network of tunnels throughout the interior of the living system, avenues of communication and connection, hidden, inaccessible to control...tunneling within the world. The woodpecker is opening windows and slip-holes into it. A deep woodpecker-grid. I will remember it now when I hear that knocking on wood.

March 23, 2020. In a shopping mall. An illness is going around. Near waking, someone says to me, “Dream about skating. Dream about horses. Should help.”

I saw ultraviolet light on my inner eyelids, or from the corner of my eye, or inter-dimensionally. A nimbus, a bee vision overlaying a cluster of roadside wildflowers in June. It was like seeing them through the eyes of someone in an otherworld. I sensed violet hues floating everywhere.

In my “Fairy Ring” card set, my favorite is the “Fairy Hart.” The great white stag leads you on adventures, and you must follow. His reversed aspect is “The Unicorn,” seen reflected in a pool, with a violet sky beneath him. The Faerie Hart says, ”Use my antlers to pierce the cloud. Thrust rays like sun to shred it.” Deer and horses and skaters glide. By virtue of hooves and blades they move as though in another plane.

July 18, 2020. There is to be an event at a conference center. Something to do with the Neowise comet. It will be in the early morning hours just after midnight. Jade and Geoff and I decide to go. We take a bus. I notice no one is wearing masks. Nor is anyone at the conference center. It’s a vital scene, bursting with in-person community and energy.

We move through corridors and rooms, among streams of people. I notice Nicole Maxwell, a dancer who, in the 1960s, traveled to the South American rainforest and was educated in herbs by indigenous doctors. With naïve trust, she brought back samples for pharmaceutical companies, which then deliberately lost and mixed them up. She returned to the forest to do her own research. Now, in the dream, our eyes meet in recognition.

Ahead of us are two rooms. In one there are living sculptures of intricate gold wire. They move about slowly. They remind me of el-Anatsui’s work from Nigeria. In the other room is the event we’re heading for. Performance artists, all male, roll great cylinders of gold on the floor of a gym. They clang against each other. It’s a sound-sculpture. Sand is scattered, and the scrape and sibilant brush of it is added to the sound-mix. Finally, large discs of polished red stone are thrown down and moved around to click and clack among the rhythms of scratch and hiss and golden clang. They resemble red blood cells. I intend to dance among the cylinders and sand-grains and rocks—and know that this will be welcome.

I want to see Ibrahim Manama’s installation at the UMMA, jute bags sewn together covering the entire façade of the newer building annex. It’s an expression relating to global commerce. Because of quarantine, the artist could not travel to Michigan to assemble his work, so it was carried out by local people at the university.

But, I get the dates of the exhibition wrong and miss it. Disappointed. I’m confronted instead by a new, monolithic sculpture, “Behind the Walls” by Jaume Plensa. It’s a white, polyester resin and marble-dust portrait of a woman covering her eyes with her hands. It’s beautifully executed, and I’d be comfortable enough coming upon it in the garden of a city art museum. It is interesting in photos of its former installation in Rockefeller Plaza with city crowds streaming by, but the dominating size, and intended permanence of it at a university, are disturbing to me. Why a permanent sculpture of a young woman, possibly of typical student age, covering her eyes? Or are they being covered by someone standing behind her?

I imagine a group of witchy young women dressed as Medusas, posing for a photograph, gathered around it with eyes staring wide.

I dream of other secret night-meetings, mostly at the library where I’ve resumed working. In the dreams, the energy is cheerful. Steps outside lead down a Mayan pyramid. Once, I parachuted to the library grounds from above them. Inside the building there’s a swimming pool. A co-worker, Angella, and I are preparing for a party.

The first of several attempts to gather a group in person: June, 2020, under the Kentucky coffee trees at Leslie Science Center. We spread ourselves apart several feet. No one wears a mask. We pass around a talking stick, with variations on welcome or reluctance to touch it. Not much is known yet about surfaces and transmission—but the beribboned stick makes its rounds. Each person can talk, for ten minutes without interruption, about their experiences, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. It’s powerful. There are some major differences of opinion, but the gathering remains harmonious, bonded, even through some arguments that occur later on. Curtis Glatter plays strong percussion; we dance and touch trees.

Each time we meet, rainbows paint the air, and we recover for a moment our sense of balance and sane reality.

August, Annual River and Dream dance by invitation only to “regulars.” We prepare to walk into the water. Jennifer arranges a turquoise veil over Hailey’s lower face and she becomes a mysterious priestess. Performances: Kelsey’s clear voice sounds from a rock near the water—fey, sweet, and piercing, accompanied by her steel tongue drum. Jade and Geoff play a river song from beside the platform where those who witness stand or sit on a bench. I dance at the river’s edge in the guise of the green cat I’d dreamed of who stirs the waters and guards the memories of rocks. Cindy performs belly dance on the boardwalk. Then we tread one by one into the Huron to dance in rhythm with currents of water and air and music. At moments we are still so that the river is all that moves.

Late August, in a wide circle, seven of us spaced well apart. The river braids gold and green light. We tell true stories. A brood of “teenage” ducks, fully-grown but with feathers so smooth and shiny they seem polished, come staggering excitedly into the circle. They remain there until Daniel’s dog, Stella, barks at them, and then they flee precipitously.

“You’re the last person I hugged,” one friend tells me.” Right on the street by the Federal Building. I remember the surge of warmth and defiance. That was five months ago, back on March 13.

This August evening, Jade and Geoff play more music. A silvery insect dances between them like a fleck of mercury, and a frog sings from the river. I present “Jaguar Brings Fire,” a dance based on a Seddon-Boulet painting. The Cedar Bend hill behind us is breathing, alive with late-summer sounds, a mesh of gold and silver: crickets, cicadas, breezes, steeped in a green brushy mist.

June 26, 2020. A mountain, with an opening into it. I see a fire shining in a cave. A community of people. They are, in part, learning what to do in a time like this one. Following them will be another group, “solar” again, living out in sunlight.

Two fire gatherings: one on Halloween night, the other six months later. The phoenix in its fiery nest murmured and spat and rustled soft, searing feathers—the wood glowed and blackened. The moon hauled itself up through the tree line, lifted into clear sky, trailed silver on indigo water by the boardwalk. Fire coals warmed muffins. Ellie was a full moon, I was a fox-face, Win Quay was an elegant mystery cat, Daniel tended the fire. During the spring gathering, we told stories that flowed around us and into the night, touching pasts and futures, and I chose not to lead a planned ritual. It was too fine and real just to see certain friends again in the warm, wavering light.

May 18, 2021. I’m in a big courtyard, or schoolyard, or (I realize when waking) a village or city compound in Nigeria, where I lived for two years as a child. Square holes have been dug in the ground. Within them stirs some strange purple substance, both gelatinous and ethereal, streaked with silver. It has to do with vaccination. I step over and around them.

When I was seven years old, living in Ibadan, Nigeria, I began to write books. Short ones, but books, nonetheless. One of the first was named “Farland,” for a country I imagined around Lithuania or Latvia. In Farland, some people could see faeries and some could not. It ran in families. The fae would sometimes dig invisible holes into which those who couldn’t see them would find themselves falling. It does not escape me that I now live in the county of “Farland” (Washtenaw means “far country”). I learn during 2021 that an earlier form of vaccination named variolation existed in Africa and India. Powdered pathogens were administered through incisions in skin, not penetrating deep into the body, but apparently effective against illness. An African slave taught a version of it to physicians in the U.S.

December 24, 2020. A sculpture of metal strips and bars, composing a giant hand, next to a cart moving along a street. It reminds me of the old picture from the Yellow Pages: Let your fingers do the walking—stiff, clumsy fingers in this instance. It connects to Covid-19. We can change, move, or replace the hand to cure or change the situation.

I have a little Internet again by late June, and much more in November. I start to do research of my own. I learn more than I thought I would ever want to about viruses, epidemics past and present, inoculations, big pharmaceutical companies, their ties to government and technology corporations, legislation concerning them, and how laws are crafted.

March 30, 2021. Symbolically, workers are compelled to drink water with rust in it from an underground river.

Same night: A voice tells me, “Money and war have always been connected. Money comes from a dripping blade.”

But it doesn’t have to. Money is only symbolic credit and can be invested with whatever value or meaning the empowered choose, connected to the flow in any way. Its generative symbolism could be given into the hands of everyone, not only a few.

In 2018-19, I heard talk of “a big recession expected in 2020, to rival that of 2008.” The signs were apparently there. I don’t know how to read them. I am convinced, however, that the demand for endless growth is entering a tightening spiral. Centuries ago, when banking as we know it began, a hundred years might pass between crashes. In my grandparents’ generation, forty years. Now the cycle is rapid. During low periods, the adventurous and skilled often know where to invest. Big tech companies have recently been involving themselves in “health care” and pharmaceuticals. A friend attended a seminar by an international bank five years ago. Participants were advised to invest in pharma.

The response to the virus (not the virus itself, as so often stated) fosters conditions of mixed environmental blessing and economic curse. Tourist hot spots suffering the weight of curiosity and high-speed travel: ancient walls crumbling, flowers crushed, canals overcrowded—now get a break. Some overworked humans are able to rest. I hear stories of environmental recoveries, reappearances of animals long departed from a region. At home, I hear a greater variety of birdsongs. Many of us learn to live in the moment, as the future is unpredictable.

Would it be possible to build a deliberate, just, and merciful pause into the rhythm of economic life? It would mean changing something fundamental in its mechanics. But that potential change, based in recognition of our kinship with each other and all life, may be what’s needed to resolve what frightens us.

November 7, 2020. In two succeeding bowls or circular enclosures are groups of guinea pigs, packed close together. They are a variety of colors, some red-gingery.

June 25, 2020. I approach a Southern house among long silver-green grasses in moonlight. In the house are three ghost-children. A debate is occurring, do they have Covid or not?

Walking in a mushroom-rich forest after a rainstorm, my friend and I tell faerie stories, and sense entryways opening into worlds that join the roots. Linearity dissolves into a mesh that science is only beginning to apprehend and describe. Maybe it was necessary at first to be atomistic, to study one thing at a time, replicate it in labs, and make statements based on a simpler conception. It’s probably still how vaccines are created.

People close to the land have always sensed living webs from which the fae arise into human imagination that interprets a consciousness both close and foreign to our own. There are poisons and healing in it. We refuse to cooperate with it at peril to the whole. Within it, viruses have a vital, balancing role. They’re highly intelligent and responsive. Life would not continue long without them.

Poor conditions of air, water, and soil, corresponding gut imbalances, pollution, social inequities, and a sense of despair all tend to foster disease. If the place in question is a tourist or business destination, illness may wind up traveling far. Electronics, little or no less than the petroleum industry, depend on mining which poisons and depletes ecosystems, alters familiar and sacred landscapes, and forces communities and cultures to adopt life-rhythms of invaders. There is not much financial incentive for recycling. The mining and manufacturing, dependent on fossil fuels, contribute to the smog-clouds in photographs. It’s easier to ignore and dismiss if we don’t have to see it in our own neighborhoods and environs. Easier, then, to promote a “new normal” that would be increasingly dependent on it, but that does not include or benefit half the earthly human population.

Waking Journey: A Tarot card, the Eight of Cups, signifying a withdrawal. A woman follows a trail of goblets, some spilling seawater, into a cavern by a moonlit ocean. I follow her into an underworld realm of fungi, glowing little parasols, mycelia hairs, prismatic in darkness beneath the roots. I feel impelled to explore this realm. It’s fantastic, alive, the origin of Faerie: beauty and a whisper of death, translation between elements and worlds. It’s part of what pharmacologists and alchemists are drawn to infiltrate, and simultaneously a place where imaginative people find inspiration for creative media.

Under a powerful scope, we see floating discs and larva-like shapes immersed in soft rainbows: a tranquil yet disquieting image of a liminal zone between all possible conditions, of living and dying, health and disease. Microbes. From photos of their role in fermentation you can imagine the sensation of tiny, clinging fur coats soft against the skin. They seem to whisper continually of transmutation, sensual mergings, infusion of membranes with light.

Life sends forth tendrils, flows in waves, spirals, tree formations, scatters of blown-down leaves, collages of nuts and cones decaying into nourishment for rebirth. It contracts into seeds, expands into universes. No straight lines.

The digital world: Constructed of tiny squares, no taste, no touch, or none but friction with the machine, a faint scent of its components. Too much like the symptoms of the “novel” blood-disease that resembles, to my limited understanding, a poison more than any virus I’m more familiar with. A constriction or closure of the deepest instinctual senses that link us to early ancestry, to other animals, to this messy, yet dynamically balanced earthly life. The senses that can be fooled the least evoke memory.

Touch a machine and take yourself on an imaginative journey into its origins. Allow sensations to flow, enter its dream. The machine, as an entity, may not dream, but its elements do. They remember where they came from. They may remember hands that touched them, souls that intertwined momentarily with their substance. Even in dreaming and imagination, the experience of the senses is more complete than it is online.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was believed that spirits could be trapped in gems to act as servants. Lorenzo de’Medici was said to have died after he released a long-time spirit servant from a ring. The elemental creatures associated then with fire were called salamanders: little glowing dragons, visions within flames.

I imagine sometimes that we have spirits or salamanders imprisoned or voluntarily participating in the working of electronic machines. Some of us know the sensation of creatures struggling to free themselves, as we hunch over blue-white fires, feeding them bits of ourselves.

June 5, 2020. My sixteen-year-old niece has a screen in front of her face. Her image is distorted, robotic. I am angry, declaring that I will protect her and her generation from having this imposed on them.

Three years ago, she and I looked up from a beach at Lake Michigan into a sky that was a midnight floor set with clouded millions of stars. The waves suddenly seemed to gather up more force in the night. “Maybe we don’t really need all that stuff,” she said. She meant the machines, and she’s very good with them.

February 20, 2021. A structure of big green blocks is being built on a mountain plateau. It reminds me of Macchu Picchu, except that it’s created from an artificial polymer. It’s meant to be a healing, a cure. I am looking at it from above, as if flying. I am not sure I trust it.

July 31, 2020. A gray dome over the world, a “prison capsule.” A way through it is shown: a Shinto torii gate. Beyond the gate is a forest.

“La Résistance Vivante.” The phrase occurs to me. I hesitate, recalling the aphorism “What you resist persists.” But I’m thinking of “La Résistance Française” in World War II, of healthy immune systems, of resistance to despair and to propaganda that undermines health and prosperity, sometimes in the name of promoting it.

What might be a vision of that resistance? We honor and trust the mesh of fungi and microbes. We understand that death is “a change of worlds,” soul-shaking, yet necessary to life, alive in itself. There is a right timing for each of us, even while pledging to assist in healing. We know that choice and variety are vital and that complete control is neither necessary nor desirable. We develop an exchange mode that resonates with flows of service, materials, and gifting.

We ask the stars in their flower-patterns, the elements, the trees, the rocks, the animals, the core of Earth, the liquid fire that wraps it, the subterranean ocean beneath ringwoodite glass, for permission, for guidance, for inspiration. Ask, trust, and nurture the body, electricity cloaked in chemistry.

We unfold and recover capacities inherent in our own electromagnetic fields for communication, perception, and creativity. Other animals, and humans living close to the pulse, can know where to walk, smell approaching weather, sense impending earthquakes and tsunamis, communicate over distances without mechanical devices, and experience every element as conscious in its own way.

This blue and white and many-colored sphere is a wondrous adventure: One among many, no less than any.

By the river, Jenny and I laugh with gentle fists in the air. “La Résistance!”

March 29, 2021. A little wooden chest with drawers in it connects to my heritage from one of my grandfathers. I’m told that something automated would “work better.” I refuse to accept that. I embrace the chest and know that love is the power.

Irena Nagler writes fiction, essay, and poetry, teaches environmental movement meditation, and is a visual and performing artist. She has been researching the environmental, social, and industrial underpinnings of current technology for eleven years. Contact her by email at: birena@umich.edu.